As the number of loyalty solutions in the marketplace increases, customers are developing preferences for specific loyalty programs. At the same time, small retailers are developing relationships with larger retailers to honor their loyalty programs at their sites. Further, as the number of loyalty solutions in the marketplace increases, the number of programs and discount types that are offered to customers is increasing at a faster rate than point-of-sale (“POS”) technologies can change.
Many loyalty programs implemented in a retail environment require custom interfaces in order to collect proper information about sales from the POS and to deliver appropriate discounts to the POS. Often this requires that the retail merchant purchase a loyalty program from their POS provider or spend a substantial amount of money. To further complicate matters, the cost of transaction fees across hosted clearing houses keeps increasing.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a mechanism by which loyalty programs and POS devices can easily talk to each other and enable a given loyalty client to access a large number of loyalty programs without requiring custom interfaces. There is also a need in the art for a means of supporting new loyalty programs and discount types without requiring costly changes to POS systems. There is a further need for a means to effectively interpret discount types and offers and present it to the POS system using types already supported.